Search form

Tag: pornography

Pornography producer John Stagliano is on trial in Washington, D.C., accused of interstate trafficking of obscenity. Reason has been producing workmanlike coverage of the trial.

Setting aside the constitutionally difficult prospect of defining obscenity, the trial is replete with procedural anomalies that call into question the basic fairness of the proceedings.

District Court Judge Richard Leon ruled that Stagliano cannot use expert witnesses, and shut the press out of the jury selection process (which, after a full week, has yet to finish). Things don’t bode well for a free and open trial: The courtroom monitors that will display the crucial evidence are all arranged to be out of the sightlines of press and interested citizens, viewable only by jurors and lawyers. If the press and the public cannot see the evidence, how will we know if the trial is fair?

One of the proposed expert witnesses for the defense is University of California Santa Barbara Film Studies Professor Constance Penley, who would have testified to the artistic value of the indicted films. Artistic value is one of the characteristics of non-obscene materials, so this cripples Stagliano’s defense from the outset. Reason’s interview with Penley is available here.

The judge has even kept the jury selection questionnaire’s secret. Richard Abowitz is covering the trial for Reason. His latest dispatch is available here. Read the whole thing. Additional coverage from The Blog of Legal Times is available here. Full disclosure: Stagliano is a former Cato donor.

In this NPR story Nina Totenberg gives both sides their say. But twice she refers to the people advocating Second Amendment rights as “gun advocates” (and once as “gun rights advocates”). That’s not the language NPR uses in other such cases. In 415 NPR stories on abortion, I found only one reference to “abortion advocates,” in 2005. There are far more references, hundreds more, to “abortion rights,” “reproductive rights,” and “women’s rights.” And certainly abortion-rights advocates would insist that they are not “abortion advocates,” they are advocates for the right of women to choose whether or not to have an abortion. NPR grants them the respect of characterizing them the way they prefer.

Similarly, NPR has never used the phrase “pornography advocates,” though it has run a number of stories on the First Amendment and how it applies to pornography. The lawyers who fight restrictions on pornography are First Amendment advocates, not pornography advocates.

And the lawyers who seek to guarantee our rights under the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be called Second Amendment advocates, or advocates of the right to self-defense, or civil liberties advocates. Or even “gun rights advocates,” as they do advocate the right of individuals to choose whether or not to own a gun. But not “gun advocates.”